Verse of the day · September 26
Why does Romans 12:3 say the measure of faith was dealt to every man?
A high opinion of yourself would have some excuse if you held the monopoly on the Spirit's gifts.
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For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.
Romans 12:3
Paul was writing to a church in Rome, and where the chapter opens he is asking, not ordering: I beseech you therefore, brethren. He was an apostle and could have ordered them; he asked instead, out of love for them, and because many are more easily led than driven. Two verses later the asking stops. For I say, he writes — and he says where the right to say it comes from. Through the grace given unto me: the grace he means here is chiefly the office he had been handed, an apostle's commission to say this to a church in God's name. An apostle was a man Christ himself had sent — an ambassador, speaking in the place of the one who sent him, on authority that was not his own. Then he uses it to say something blunt: do not think of yourself more highly than you ought. Leaning on the office instead of on himself is itself the modesty he is asking them for — and the office both gave him the right to be that blunt and required him to be.
The chapter is the turn of the whole letter. Eleven chapters of argument are finished: everything comes from God and runs back to God, and everything these people had, they had been given. In the two verses before it: hand God your bodies as a living sacrifice; be remade from the mind outward; stop letting the world shape you. Then this one. One way a mind that has stopped copying the world shows it: it does not think too highly of itself. And of all the duties he could have started with, he started with humility — humility about what a person has been given, which is exactly what the eleven chapters had just proved, and what handing your body over admits: no claim on yourself, and nothing of your own to be proud of.
The instruction goes to every man that is among you: every member of the church, in office or not, whether his gifts were large or small. Every one of them had been given something by the Spirit to use. The Spirit is God's own Spirit, himself living in all of them; the abilities are God's to give, and he gives them freely, to whom he pleases, by that same Spirit, for the man's own good and everybody else's. And they were in Rome, where a man was measured by his rank, his money, his way with words, or the post he held — and the danger was that the same way of sizing people up would take hold inside the church. Whether it already had, the chapter does not say; but new believers handed abilities like these might easily be puffed up with them, each one keen to talk his own up and the next man's down.
Soberly, here, is a word about the mind: a mind in good working order, thinking with judgement, modestly, humbly. Taking your own measure by the right standard — how a man stands towards God — and not by rank or money or talent.
There are two ways to get it wrong. One is to claim more than you have, which talks down people whose abilities may match yours or beat them. The other is to take the credit for what you do have, as though it came out of your own sharpness and diligence and hard work rather than being given to you. Sobriety needs both halves.
Later in the same chapter he comes back to it: be not wise in your own conceits. It spoils a man's usefulness — and what he was given, the rest were meant to have the use of. It stops him learning anything further. It tempts him to brush off every piece of advice he is given, and to treat the people around him with arrogance. And it earns him their contempt.
What the verse states is itself one of the strongest things there is against taking the credit. People are usually proud of what they take to be their own making, or of what they think depends on them. Where the same ability is regarded as God's gift, it ceases to feed pride at all, and the feeling is at once changed into gratitude.
Then comes the reason: according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. He names it by faith because faith is the root grace, the one the others come in by. What is being measured here is not whether a man belongs to God. It is the gifts that come with believing, and the capacity to take them in — how much of what God meant for everyone else's good a man could hold. That capacity was dealt out, a measure to every man: some given more than others, all of them given some, none of them given all. And whatever that measure holds, it did not start with the man holding it. Which is why a man with no rank and no money may stand every bit as high as one who has both.
If one of us held a monopoly on the gifts — the whole supply, with nobody else holding a share — the high opinion would at least have something to stand on. But other people have their share too, so we are in no position to look down on them, as if we were the only ones heaven had any time for. And whatever gifts any of us holds, we hold in measure. Christ had gifts without measure — no portion, no limit. He is the root they all draw from, not one of the people the shares were dealt to. And he was gentle and humble. Are we the ones who get to be proud?
Having said dealt to every man, Paul goes straight to the picture of a body. Many members in one body, he says, and every one members one of another. The eye cannot hear, the ear cannot see, the hand takes hold of things and the foot walks; none of them can do another's work. And every one of them in that body was chosen by God, bought by Christ, put right by his righteousness, made holy by his Spirit, joined to him as the head. That standing was not dealt out in shares: the man with the smallest job in the place held every bit of it. Then the gifts themselves get named, seven of them — preaching, serving, teaching, encouraging, giving, leading, showing mercy — and each man is told to get on with what he actually has. And how would a man tell how much was his? It seems to show in what he knows, what he has been through, and how much use that makes him in the church.
None of that is an accident. God did not put everything into every man's hands to do, and the man who steps outside the work he was given gets nowhere with it, does other people real harm, and wears out everyone including himself. The unevenness is there to tie them to each other: whatever any one of them was given, everybody gets the use of it. So nobody there had grounds to resent a smaller share, and nobody had grounds to think himself unimportant.
Which leaves each man holding something, with a use for it. Whatever he was given, he was not given it for himself; he was given it for other people. He is not to be proud of it, and he is not to bury it either. And there is a failure here that wears humility as a disguise. It is not the man whose low estimate of himself is simply accurate. It is the man who calls it modesty, calls it self-denial, and is really just slack about putting himself out for anybody.
So a man who has taken an honest measure of himself can say I am nothing in two quite different ways. One of them stops there: I am nothing, therefore I will sit still and do nothing. The other does not: I am nothing in myself, so I will give everything I have — on strength that comes from the grace of Christ, and not from me.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Adam Clarke, Albert Barnes and the Geneva Bible notes. How these teachings are made